Robert Culp directs this dark thriller, while Walter
Hill
wrote the
energetic script. Hickey & Boggs teams TV's I Spy
duo of Bill Cosby
and Robert Culp as down-and-out LA private eyes who
take what they
think
is a simple case for $200 a day plus expenses from an
effete lawyer
named
Rice to find a missing woman, Mary Jane, in which he
gives them a list
of names to help in their search. When each name on
the list is killed,
the private eyes find that they become the next
targets as they have
stumbled
into a far more complicated case than first
perceived--involving an
attempt
to fence a suitcase filled with $400,000 from a recent
Pittsburgh bank
robbery.

The investigating police officers led by Sergeant
Papadakis
and Lieutenant
Wyatt are not pleased that dead bodies keep popping up
wherever the two
gumshoes appear, and threaten to take away their
licenses. The private
eyes soon find themselves with a client who
disappeared and the
discovery
that Mary Jane is married to the Quemando brother in
prison, the other
radical Chicano activist works as a florist. Mary Jane
is holding the
stolen
Pittsburgh money in a suitcase and attempting to fence
it, the only
trouble
is that the bank heist was arranged by mob chief Brill
and he wants his
money back. The vicious Brill gets his three top
soldiers to find her
and
the money.

Hickey and Boggs learn from the police about the
$25,000
reward for
the stolen bank money and continue on the case hoping
to get the
reward.
At the empty LA Coliseum on the Rams off-day the duo
interrupt a deal
going
down between Mary Jane and her buyers, but the mob
soldiers execute the
buyer and nearly get the woman before she escapes with
the money. Rice
reappears and it is learned he's a fence who works for
Mr. Leroy, the
head
of a black power group that moved from Watts to
Bel-Aire.

The private detectives are warned by all parties to
mind
their own
business, but when Hickey's estranged wife is slain by
the soldiers in
an effort to get them off their backs the detective
duo vows revenge.
Though
successful at the end, the detectives feel like losers
as they reflect
on the changes the modern world has wrought--relating
their world as
the
one of film noir. The duo feels impotent to change the
world or do
good,
their job makes them say in frustration "Nobody cares.
It's about
nothing."
These dudes have lost their Raymond Chandler edge of
being someone
important
anymore in this chaotic world. The struggling Hickey
was never home for
his wife and kid, while Boggs has become a drunk who
can't get over
that
his stripper wife dumped him and spends his spare time
in a drunken
glaze
torturing himself by attending the dives where she
strips.